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Tuesday, 22 January 2013

The Algerian kidnappers and the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

The only thing that surprised me when I heard that the Algerian
kidnappers had called for the release of Dr Aafia Siddiqui was that it hadn’t
happened sooner.

Don’t get me wrong, as a former hostage myself, there is no way I
condone the actions of what has unfolded in a remote corner of the Algerian
desert.

And my heart goes out to
the families of those who have lost loved ones in the unfolding drama at a gas
plant siege said to have been mastermindedby Mohktar Belmokhtar. The infamous
one-eyed Algerian militant apparently with ties to al Qaida, has claimed
responsibility for launching Wednesday’s attack.

It also goes without
saying there is no way the kidnappers, whether politically or criminally
motivated, can be justified in their actions.

But an injustice is an
injustice and as the only western journalist to have specifically gone to
Afghanistan to investigate the case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, I have to say
her plight has become a cause célèbre around the Muslim world.

And I have an uncomfortable
feeling that more and more westerners will be kidnapped as their captors demand
the release of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a woman I once called the most wronged in the
world.

So just who is Dr Aafia
Siddiqui and why is a group of North Africans calling for her release?

Well it’s very easy to
get emotional about a wronged Muslim woman caught up in the War on Terror
but I am not basing my case on emotion just some simple cold, hard facts
and forensic evidence … or lack of it, but more of that and her bizarre story later.

Her family will
certainly not be pleased that a group of Algerian terrorists have called for
her release because it will give a perception in some quarters that Dr Aafia
must be an Islamic extremist. It’s a narrative pushed by US intelligence although
it has to be said in her trial the opening statement of the prosecutor stated
quite clearly that she was not al-Qaida nor a terrorist sympathiser.

The case of the
mother-of-three is well known in every household in Pakistan from the most
religious to the most secular … the majority of which have been demanding her
repatriation for years. Now she is known as the Daughter of the Nation although
her story has travelled well beyond Pakistan’s borders.

Thousands of Muslim
children have been named after her because of all that she has come to
symbolise. Everything that she represents stems from the injustices created by
America’s War on Terror … the kidnaps, renditions, torture, rape and
waterboarding.

The brilliant academic,
educated in top US universities, is tonight languishing in a Texan jail serving
an 86 year sentence after being found guilty of trying to kill American
soldiers.

The fact they shot her
at close range and nearly killed her is often overlooked.

To their eternal shame,
the US soldiers serving in Afghanistan claimed in court under oath that the
diminutive, fragile academic leapt at them from behind a prison cell curtain,
snatching one of their guns to shoot and kill them. It was a fabricated story
that any defence lawyer worth his or her salt would have ripped apart at the
seams.

The scenario painted in
court was incredulous and more importantly, the evidence non-existent – no
gunshot residue on her hands or clothes, no bullets from the discharged gun, no
fingerprints belonging to Dr Aafia on the gun … other vital evidence removed by
US military from the scene went missing before the trial. Come on, we’ve all
seen episodes of CSI – the science doesn’t lie.

After being patched up
in a medical wing in Bagram, she was then renditioned to America to stand trial
for an alleged crime committed in Afghanistan. Flouting the vienna and Geneva
Conventions, she wasn’t given consular access until the day she made her first
court appearance.

The trial was held in
New York, a stone’s throw from where the Twin Towers once stood making it
impossible not to invoke the memories of that horrific day on september 11
which for some forever turned Muslims into Public Enemy Number One.

A lack-lustre legal team
forced on Dr Aafia by the US authorities failed to sway the jury of her
innocence, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that she could not have
snatched a soldier’s gun, let alone pulled the trigger.

I went into the cell a
few weeks after the shooting in July 2008 and discovered that the soldiers had
panicked and sprayed the room with bullets as they struggled to flee. The
evidence is there on film shot during my visit and handed over to the defence
team.

Seeing Dr Aafia emerge
unshackled and unhooded from behind a curtain caused blind panic among the
young soldiers who had been briefed by the FBI they were going to arrest one of
the most dangerous women in the world.

I interviewed
eyewitnesses, senior Afghan police officers who one after another told me what
happened. Yet the only Afghan brought to court to give testimony against her
was the FBI’s translator who now has a green card and lives in New York with
his family.

What the jury was not
told is that Dr Aafia, and her three children, all aged under five at the time,
had been kidnapped from a street near their home in Karachi and disappeared
from 2003.

The FBI put out a story
at the time that she had in fact gone on a jihad to Afghanistan – it was a
ludicrous tale without foundation and, as every mother of young children knows,
a journey to the local corner shop with toddlers is a monumental challenge so
heading off to fight in Afghanistan with a pram, pushchair and toddler in hand
is simply inconceivable. The FBI narrative was destroyed by Boston-based Elaine
Whitfield Sharp, a lawyer hired by the Siddiqui family when Dr Aafia first
disappeared.

The missing years
of the academic’s life reveal a story which is now known to virtually
everyone in the Muslim world where she is widely regarded as a victim of George
W Bush’s War on Terror.

As she tried to tell the
jury how she was held in secret prisons, with no legal representation, cut off
from the outside world since 2003 where brutal interrogation techniques were
used to break her down, she was silenced by the judge who said he was only
interested in the cell shooting incident.

Judge Richard Berman, a
modest little man with much to be modest about, insisted he was not interested
in the missing years; it had no relevance to the case he insisted.

She testified that after
completing her doctorate studies she taught in a school, and that her interest
was in cultivating the capabilities of dyslexic and other special needs
children. She emerged as a humanity-loving nurturer and educator, the gentle
yet resolute seeker for truth and justice.

As the evidence
continued we learned that she didn’t know where her three children were – it
was sensational content for those who knew the real story. She talked of her
dread and fear of being handed back to the Americans when she was arrested in
Ghazni and was held by police.

Terrified that yet
another secret prison was waiting for her she revealed how she peaked through
the curtain divider into the part of the room where Afghans and Americans were
talking, and how when a startled American soldier noticed her, he jumped up and
yelled that the prisoner was loose, and shot her in the stomach. She described
how she was also shot in the side by a second person. She also described how
after falling back onto the bed in the room, she was violently thrown to the
floor and lost consciousness. This ties in exactly with what I was told by the
counter terrorism police chief I interviewed in Afghanistan back in the autumn
of 2008 – I remember him laughing as he told me how the US soldiers panicked,
shot randomly in the air as they stampeded out of the room in a blind panic.

Of course there’s no way
a bunch of soldiers are going to admit they lost it, but according to those I
interviewed for my film “In search of Prisoner 650 in Afghanistan” that’s
exactly what happened.

Two of her missing
children have since been found and reunited with their extended family in
Karachi. It is still not clear where the children were held when they were
snatched from a street in Karachi but there’s no disguising their American
accents … possibly picked up from their jailers.

So why did the FBI want
to speak to Dr Aafia in the first place and why did they portray her as a
dangerous terrorist on the run? if she was the person they painted why wasn’t
she charged with terrorism offences and why was the prosecutor at pains to
point out that she was not al Qaida?

The bottom line is Dr
Aafia Siddiqui should not be in prison and as long as this injustice continues
she will become a rallying call for anyone who wants to pick a fight with
America.

Acknowledging the
injustice and returning Dr Aafia to her home in Pakistan will not stop
extremists from causing terror, but it might make the lives of US citizens a
lot safer if this wrong is put to right.

British journalist Yvonne Ridley is a patron
of CagePrisoners as well as being the European President of the International
Muslim Women's Union and the Vice President of the European Muslim League.

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